“Your instinctual self is that aspect of you that sends signals to your brain directly from your body. It is what is responsible for your survival – particularly when you are in a life threatening situation and must avoid danger by fighting, fleeing, or remaining still and quiet. Your instinct dictates which choice most likely ensures your perpetuation. It is much more primal than intellect, and it is what connects humans with other animals.

The trust for your instinctual signals can be modified and distorted by conditioning, especially childhood conditioning. When you are repeatedly told to distrust what your body is telling you or you have faced life threatening situations, with no escape, this exquisite survival mechanism becomes clouded at the least and completely suppressed at the extreme. It is replaced by either a generalized fear and agitation that gets projected onto relatively benign situations, or else a psychic numbness that anesthetizes the senses and severely limits your body’s ability to process environmental cues for danger. This sensory numbness also limits your ability to fully experience pleasure.

Take time to tune in to your gut feelings, using slow, deep breathing as an access code. Listen with all your senses to discern what your body is telling you, and use your intellect to interpret whether it is a conditioned reaction or an instinctual response. With practice, you will refine your perceptual capabilities so that you can completely trust what you feel.

Every limitation that we encounter can be traced back to our perception of ourselves. We set our own limitations. Period. In setting them, we have taken into account all the information we have gathered not just over this lifetime, but over our many lifetimes. Some of this information may be perceived as negative. Some of it may just have come from little snippets of things that people have said to us long ago; things that they may or may not even remember saying; things that we have held on to for our whole lives. Stories that we have created to describe ourselves and what is possible. Everyone has a story.

These things need not affect us any more, we must let them all go and start fresh.

If we do not let the past hurts go, we use them as shields to protect us from our present experience. We assume when offered a new opportunity that things may turn out the same as they did in the past. We give away our power as we don’t trust ourselves to make healthy decisions. We fight anxiety and experience fear when we go against the fear and doubt experienced by our bodies. We look through a tainted lens, projecting what we think could happen and not allowing the situation to fully unfold.

This is not about ignoring intuition, it is about trusting it in the moment. It is about tuning in instead of over thinking and over analyzing. It is about having faith in something new.

We must believe in ourselves; strengthen the connection to our intuition. We must take back our power and trust in our instincts. They will never let us down if we truly listen. They will always guide us on our highest path.